The Things She Left Behind
by iviscrit
Summary: "I wake up and wonder if I'll ever hold her again, or when I'll hear her husky voice, colored with a rasp from years of barking orders by day and crooning throaty contralto jazz songs by night. She's gone, stranded in a prison that she willfully brought on herself, and I'm stranded with the things she left behind." Baatar tries to move on.


_I don't love her anymore._

At least, that's what I tell myself. Every morning, she isn't the first thing I see when I wake, even after the glasses are on and years of congenital myopia are resolved through acetate and glass. She isn't the first person I speak to, and hers isn't the first voice I hear. Despite that, she's the first thing that I think of every day- even though I know she's far from me, and that I'll likely never see her again. I wake up and wonder if I'll ever hold her again, or when I'll hear her husky voice, colored with a rasp from years of barking orders by day and crooning throaty contralto jazz songs by night. I hear the the morning salutations of the birds outside, and I remember the way she'd follow their chirrups with the rise and fall of her whistle. She's gone, stranded in a prison that she willfully brought on herself, and I'm stranded with the things she left behind.

I thought living with them would be easier by now.

I can hear the same songs she used to sing on our nights alone aboard the train without changing the record. I can see a headline about the disgraced Great Uniter in the paper and get by with a dull pain in my chest, instead of that dazed, purposeless disbelief I used to feel. It's been six weeks since I've seen her face, and five days more since I last heard her voice- maybe it would be easier to forget her if her last words to me had been different. Something different, something cold and unfeeling like the person she became.

But I don't remember her ever being like that. And now she's gone, so I can only question the little things that she left behind. They don't answer. They don't speak back and they never will, but if they could they'd tell me I'm overdue for a visit. Conditional release and contracted labor are a prison of their own, but I know my sentence could be much worse. I could be imprisoned in a cell with nothing to distract me from thoughts of her, or I could be imprisoned in Zaofu where everything is tinted with her presence.

We escaped that place together. We built an empire together. Every state is tainted with her memory, every station and port stained with her love. Or was it love? She was imprisoned too, more so than me, and an ally in escape was her obvious way out. If I could write everything off as manipulation, forgetting her might be easier. The obvious things were easy to return. Her clothes, her case notes, her personal belongings… all of that is evidence, now. Evidence in her trial, and in mine. Even the things that were ours are no longer mine. Anything that her hands touched, I gave to the authorities.

But then there are those damned little traces. It's the little things that get me, every time.

I'll think about work, or my own legal nightmare, or my mother and father and siblings. I'll think about what my state as an international war criminal does to the family name, or Mother's standing with the world leaders. I'll think about the wedding gift that became the instrument of my death, or I'll think about the latest project I've been assigned in the reconstruction, and I'll reach for the grid paper and the straightedge. And I'll find something of hers. Last night, I found a single hair, long and black, threaded into the binding of the notebook.

I've returned the obvious, abandoned the old clothes, boxed the letters and love notes and stacks of wedding plans. Her photographs are banished to Zaofu, mailed in a sealed package for Wei and Wing to handle for me; Mother would want them burned. I've done all I possibly can. But how can I guard against a hair, a single strand of her that somehow survived, unseen and undetected in my notebook, waiting for the day when I've started to get over her just to throw me back to where I started? How can I move on, when everything reminds me of our history?

The changes haven't come yet. I still sleep on the left side of the bed, uncomfortably close to the edge, even though she's no longer on the right. I didn't do that back in Zaofu. I still wake up with sun, and still subject myself to runs that would've put me in shinsplints. I never ran so much as a mile every morning back in Zaofu. I still find traces of her wherever I go and wherever I look, and the harder I try to shut my eyes to them the harder they force their way in. I hear the newfound authority and self-assurance she instilled in me when I talk to my parents. I see the physical transformation when the more taxing parts of valve replacements are infinitely less strenuous than they ought to be. I feel the insistent heartache daily, when I think about an old shirt that became one of her possessions or a platinum shaving knife that became one of mine. And I hear the whisper of her voice when I hear the whisper of mail through the slot, her assurances of her love and her excitement for our married life together. I can hear her answer when I asked her to marry me, as if it was only yesterday when I asked.

I tell myself I don't love her anymore, because then I might be able to move on. The crackle of static from the radio might stop reminding of the crack in her voice when we spoke for the last time, and the things she left behind might become ordinary objects again. Spicy noodles and sauteed prawns might become ordinary entrees, and the clack of military heels on the floor might become just another sound. If telling myself that lie would work, I might be able to stop seeing her everywhere I turn.

She left too many things behind, when she let them take her away. When was that, exactly? In hindsight, it happened long before we tried to annex Republic City. She left a piece of herself in each state along the track, letting her humanity unravel like the infrastructure of our nation once had, and weaving it back into the fabric of our country. There isn't a state I can go to that isn't tied to her and her story, nor one city or port that isn't interlaced with Kuvira and myself. And even if I could go back, and untangle the mess of threads that composes the life we led together- even if I could turn back the clock to the day we first met and sever that first tie, I doubt I would. I doubt I can. She left a piece of herself in me, and to extricate it from its place inside would be like tearing out my own vital organs and letting the wounds bleed dry.

Kuvira left her things behind, but she took something with her as well. And a part of me knows -perhaps the part that once belonged to her- that if I ever want her to take them back, I'll have to stand opposite her and ask her to return what she took from me.

That day will come; I feel her pull even now. But until it does I'm stuck hiding here, in an ineffectual refuge surrounded by all her little things.

* * *

 **Did the ending make sense? Tell me if you got the ending because I'M JUST SO CHEESY UGH**  
 **bye**


End file.
